The Informality of Mass Murder
To live in the 2000s is to live surrounded by gun violence. Regardless of where we may live, what we look like, or how well off we are, every American’s heart hurts when the news of another mass shooting strikes. Yet, as time goes on, the impact almost seems to gradually wear off with the regularity of headlines and our brains inability to process that much pain. But our blind-eye is only ignoring the influx in the cases of mass murder, executed by our neighbors.
On March 22, a man walked into a Boulder, Colorado grocery store and killed 10 people while the rest of the shoppers and workers hid in coat closets, ducked under pharmacy counters, and fled into breakrooms. As all the scary details poured out in the days following, it was the little anecdotes that were the most unsettling. At the moment the gunman entered the grocery store, a newlywed couple was shopping for ingredients for a beef stroganoff recipe. Around the corner from the couple, a man was working in the meat department. In the checkout line, a woman and her son heard four gunshots and ran for the automatic front doors of the store.
These little stories are powerful because they are casual. This violence is something that often feels removed from us, something that happens overseas in faraway places against unknown enemies. To mesh the goriness of war with the casualness of a local grocery store doesn’t make any sense in our suburban brains.
Yet, this is the very thing these shooters aim to do and have arguably done. Our nation’s culture has made school grounds, movie theaters, and now grocery stores war zones and has desensitized us to the most sensitive thing there could be.
After these shootings, calls for gun control echoed throughout the community for days following, but perhaps there is something more than that. Even with gun control, it will take decades of rewiring our brains as a society to see our shared spaces without fear. This epidemic of violence goes beyond the number of kills and the bills needed to get through Congress. It has impacted the way we view our own neighborhood and stripped us of an innocence we will never get back.